Trinity wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2019 4:56 pm
Exercises cancelled again? Salty? We good with this, too?
Yes. As I said last time,
those massive exercises are primarily a saber rattling show of forces & firepower demo.
Individual & unit training alongside ROK allies continues. That's the important stuff for joint readiness.
Computer sim table top war games at HQ & staff levels continue.
Our bomber crews still bomb target ranges at home & the nav way points from Guam to Korea remain the same.
Those exercises were provocative & prompted DPRK acts, to which we declined to respond, like sinking a ROK warship.
They were a bargaining chip that's appropriate to ante up to start negotiations.
Resumption of them remains a retaliatory tool, if appropriate.
Instead the U.S. and South Korean military forces will maintain readiness to defend the South against the North with “newly-designed Command Post exercises and revised field training programs,” the Pentagon said.
The decision to continue scaled-down exercises, rather than perform the major drills, reflects a tacit acceptance by the United States of the “freeze for freeze” approach advocated by China. Despite winning no concessions from Kim at the Hanoi summit last month, Trump is continuing to keep a lid on the exercises in the hopes of reassuring Kim.
The Pentagon said the reduced training reflected a desire “to reduce tension and support our diplomatic efforts to achieve complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a final, fully verified manner.”
In his post-summit news conference in Vietnam, Trump again expressed his disdain for the joint training exercises that he continues to describe as an extravagance that South Korea should pay for. “I was telling the generals — I said: Look, you know, exercising is fun and it's nice and they play the war games. And I'm not saying it's not necessary, because at some levels it is, but at other levels it's not. But it's a very, very expensive thing.”
Trump complained that the United States spends hundreds of millions of dollars on those exercises and doesn't get reimbursed. “We fly these massive bombers in from Guam … and then they come and they drop millions of dollars of bombs, and then they go back,” said Trump. “It costs us $100 million every time we do it.”